Biography:
Eve graduated from the University of York with a BSc in Biology with a year in industry which she completed in AstraZeneca looking at statistical methods to reduce usage of rodents in immunoncology studies. Her BSc project was completed in Professor Dawn Coverley’s lab looking at the effect of endogenous proteins on epigenetic mechanisms at the inactivated X chromosome. Following University, she joined the AstraZeneca graduate scheme completing rotations in diagnostic science, cell line generation and bioinformatics.
Research Interests:
Eve’s project is looking at assessing the epigenetic changes associated with on-target CRISPR-induced toxicity in collaboration with the Clinical Pharmacology and Safety Sciences team at AstraZeneca as part of the ITTP scheme. The process of CRISPR involves a guide RNA directing a Cas9 enzyme to a gene of interest where Cas9 introduces a double strand breaks. These double strand breaks can be repaired in a number of ways to either disrupt the gene causing the protein to be non-functional or by introducing a template which is copied into the genome during repair modifying the gene. The emergence of in vivo CRISPR therapeutics to which target diseases caused by patient-specific mutations drives a need to fully understand all aspects of the process. Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes to the genome that do not involve altering the DNA sequence. In order to confirm the safety of CRISPR therapeutics it's important to understand how CRISPR interacts with the epigenome.
